From Breach to Brand Trust: Jeff Nulsen on Rebuilding and Scaling with AI

Hey Jeff, thank you for having me.

I'm refreshed, ready to go with a whole new perspective on life.

A nice way. Yeah, it's certainly a nice getaway and it gives you a lot to think about.

Sure. Yeah. So Enable is a little over 20 year old company that's made up of a number of acquisitions over the years, but started off in the RMM space, the remote monitoring and management space, targeting IT professionals, managed service providers. Over time built that offering to include data protection, the product that we now call Cove, and most recently made the purchase of a company called Ad Lumen, who's got a managed detection and response product, a cybersecurity product, and a number of other products that surrounded those all pointed at managed service providers and mid-market IT professionals to help them manage, protect, and backup and recover all of their data. So you can imagine folks in a thousand person company needing this software just as much as 5 to 10 person managed service providers who are then going off and serving small businesses who can't afford to hire their own IT department or their own cybersecurity department.

It's 90% MSPs and 10% or so into that mid-market, but the mid-market's growing. It's a big opportunity. And look, the journey has been incredible. It's a publicly held company. I joined in May of 2021, two months before we spun off from a company called SolarWinds. And Enable had been known as SolarWinds MSP. It was the MSP division of SolarWinds leading up until that spin. In July of 21, we became an independently public company, closely held by a couple private equity backers, but public. And that was a very significant shift for the company as you can imagine. A lot of new people, a lot of new technology, a lot of new process that was injected into the business and an entirely new leadership team that came along with that. And so I was part of that evolution. We went from 300 millionish at the time to about 500 million now. So it's been quite a journey.

That was five or six years.

They were the growth engine behind SolarWinds. So SolarWinds still had their own growth but the MSP division was growing at a faster rate. And look, that MSP space has been a very fast grower. For a while during those days it was going to be growing in the 20 plus percent, still growing in the mid-teens as a market. So it's a very attractive market to be playing in. It's growing in different ways than it did back then because it was very much a blue ocean for MSPs to go in and grab business from SMBs who didn't have an IT provider but started to realize that they needed it with the digital evolution. Now most of them have an IT provider and it's more of a red ocean where MSPs are going in and offering security services or other services that go above and beyond compliance, security, sometimes AI related services that allow them to steal business.

I got to go to the New York Stock Exchange and see our CEO break the gavel, which was a pretty fun and funny experience. I was two months in at that time so I felt slightly awkward standing on the podium and being there for the big event but it was quite exciting at the same time.

Yeah, because we spun, it was really almost an entirely new leadership team. There were a couple people that were coming over from SolarWinds and then there was a good mix of people who had different slightly different roles at SolarWinds and there was a good mix of external folks to get outside of our four walls and give us some perspective. Mostly looking at folks who had been at scale, right? The next phase of the evolution was to get to that 500 million. We were looking for folks who had had that type of scale experience. And the brand was stayed alive completely during the SolarWinds years. So you weren't really introducing anything new to the market.

Yeah. And it was a fun challenge to try to overcome. And again, ultimately we were successful in that. It was everything from visual identity and trying to separate ourselves through our visual identity and our tone and certainly our messaging, which had a lot to do with security but certainly wasn't only focused on security. And it had a lot to do with making sure that we were spending in the right parts of the funnel to reach the right customer or even spending quite a bit of time stepping back and ensuring that we understood who our ICP, our ideal customer profile was and writing that down and educating the entirety of our go to market teams and certainly product teams as well, but go to market to ensure that whether it's outbound through SDRs or any of the marketing that we're doing, we are putting the focus on the folks that are going to matter most to us and that we're understanding what their needs are. Big efforts and investments in content generation and education. We created quite a few new resources, branded some of those which have turned out to be really successful in terms of creating community. And of course when we got back into in-market events, we leaned in very heavily there as well. And I think that probably was one of the more impactful things that we were able to do to change the narrative on Enable, particularly as it relates to 'Hey, I thought that you were still SolarWinds, I thought that you were breached by SolarWinds just like SolarWinds was, didn't realize you had these other products.' That narrative at events, through mainstage and through breakout sessions and booths and through cocktails at the bar late at night, people working very hard around the clock, that narrative changed and again the growth started to come, which was very exciting.

I think that was the most meaningful moment of pivot for the brand. We were able to go back and really in earnest made that decision that events were going to be a very substantial portion of our budget. And we knew that the MSP community in particular favors relationships, favors the ability to have an honest conversation with an individual much ahead of some marketing fluff that we could put on a website or a beautiful piece of content or asset that we could send them an email. Some of those things add value for sure, but to the extent that we could show up at events with our head nerds and educate them on a subject, how to automate using our product or just how to automate in general, that was going to be the path and really was the path towards turning that tide.

That's a good question. I mean, my belief about brand is, so I'll answer directly, but I think this is a specific instance where that made a lot of sense. I think there are other instances where it probably makes sense too, but brands are built on experiences more than anything in my opinion. So you can do a great job with a beautiful website. You can do a great job with messaging that hits in many different channels. And you can do all the work to figure out which channels and so forth. But if you're not delivering great experiences, whether that's through the product or through the service or with great value-add content or great value-add experiences, those could be webinars, those could be boot camps, those could be peer-led communities that you create. To me, that's where brands are truly created and won. And you see it every day with PLG companies where the brand comes from the use of the product more than probably anything. But they're very thoughtful and purposeful about how to get that product in as many people's hands as possible. They don't put it behind gateways. They come up with creative ways to promote it and drive interest and make it fun and gify and all those things that can really create some virality. So in our case, I do think the events was very successful, but it wasn't the only thing we did and we did surround it with some of these other things I'm mentioning as well.

Well, I think there's two things I would say. One is the measurement matters and getting close with sales and being really precise with how you want to measure these things is important because you will hear periodically from sales members, 'Hey, that event was great' or 'That event was poor.' But sometimes that's with a time horizon that is very, very short. And so we would always look at the influenced impact of an event over multiple time horizons. 90 days was the standard. So we knew who was at the event either because it was our own hosted event or because it was somebody else's event. We were able to capture leads and we tracked those leads or prospects or customers over 90 days or 180. We knew that that was not the only thing that may have driven the impact. But certainly if it was the first instance that we were able to interact with them, we would attribute a little bit more value to it. So I'd say that's one part is measurement. And be thoughtful about how to measure. The other thing I would say is boy, are there a lot of details in how to make an event a success and that's going to be true of hosted or non-hosted. If we take trade shows as an example where you're attending and you're doing a booth but you might be doing a lot of other things too. You might be standing on main stage, you might be doing a sponsorship. You might be running a party. You might do a lot of things. You might even do some stuff outdoors, like at the airport or leading to the event. Then there's the event itself and how effective you are at the booth. You have the right people who can actually grab people and bring them through the aisles into your booth to have the conversation. Do you have the right people to give the demo? Do you have the right process to collect those leads? Is it easy? Is it seamless? Is it without friction? Do you have the right process to hand it to sales? Is there a way for you to hold accountable there? Every little detail is significant in its ability to move the needle with events. And spending time and having an events leader who understands that and who has an experimental mindset to think through, one thing we just tried was we said, 'Hey, we're going to put SDRs at events.' Why? Because two reasons really. One, their main goal and how they get paid is by creating opportunities. An event is an awesome opportunity for them to create opportunities, so that's number one. Number two, their personalities are just such that they're going to be the ones who are going to engage somebody, not sitting back at the booth. I can't tell you how many times I've walked by an event booth and the team there, they look the part and they're all dressed and you can tell they're from the same company, but nobody's engaging anybody in doing anything proactive. We've done it now three times. Great success. The SDRs were tremendous at pulling. Now, they're probably not the ones to give the demo, so you got to have a sales engineer or somebody else who can deliver the demo, but they're going to get somebody engaged and they're going to follow through with them to get that meeting because that's how they get paid. But there's 20 or 30 or 40 different aspects of making that event work really, really well.

Exactly. And I think depending on your phase, we're in a big pivot towards this cybersecurity, trying to claim cybersecurity as a category and really enable around cybersecurity. Our mantra now, thinking about this next big brand evolution, our mantra when it comes to events is we really don't want to go to these events unless we can have some significant impact beyond the booth. The main stage probably being the most impactful opportunity, but it could also be the sponsorship of a party or it could be something more creative within the facility. We don't want to show up and just have a booth like everybody else because we're in the midst of such a large change. We've got to go a little bit bigger and a little bit more differentiated and hopefully resulting in folks taking notice of us to a greater extent. And of course, we're always trying to lead with value as opposed to a selling pitch. We come with content every time, meaningful content that's going to help the audience do something better.

Yeah, it's a good question. So when I joined, Enable was really known as an RMM company and that is a good space. It's a good market. It's still a growing market, but it's not nearly as large as two other markets that we were either playing in or close to. Data protection was more than twice as large as the RMM market and growing at a faster rate, and cybersecurity was about three times as large as the RMM market and growing also at a faster rate. So those two were very attractive markets for us to play in. And we had a product that was called Enable Backup when I joined that was in this data protection space. And the customer feedback on this product was very, very strong. It did things architecturally in ways that most of the competitors could not do that resulted in much more frequent backups, ultimately a much higher likelihood of recovery, and at a cost when you look at total cost of ownership that was less than the competition. So it was a very attractive equation to go to market with. And we started with the evolution from just being 'just RMM' to how do we position this data protection product called Enable Backup as a customer acquisition tool. And one of the things we decided to do was to brand it and name it something that we could put some flavor behind. And so we named it Cove and we had a lot of fun with that because we would talk about 'your data is safe in the cove' and it had a very different vibe to it than the rest of a lot of our assets. So if you go to the Enable website and go to the Cove section of the site, you'll start to see what I mean. There's a lot of videos with oceans and beaches in the background and it's a calming effect. And we kind of took the opposite of the FUD approach, right? Like we weren't trying to drive fear when it came to data protection. We were really trying to drive the belief that Enable and Cove were the places to go to get comfort. And ultimately that's what everybody wants when it comes to data protection is just comfort and belief that the thing's going to be there when you need it. And that was the thing that Cove does exceptionally well. And so we, through a lot of trial and error and some just bold commitment, we launched that brand in May of 23. And we're now at the point where Cove is just as big of a customer acquisition tool as RMM. So we've been very successful in inserting that into our go to market plays and many plays that we did with RMM, but with a different flavor obviously focused on data protection. The last evolution that we're in the midst of now is this cybersecurity evolution. We purchased a company called Ad Lumen in November who is one of the top providers of managed detection and response and a number of other products as well. That gave us, I would say, the right to start thinking about ourselves and presenting ourselves very broadly as a cybersecurity company as an umbrella that includes a platform play basically. A platform play that includes the RMM, includes data protection, includes the MDR, but under the umbrella of where all MSPs need to go, which is security. We heard time and time again over the last couple of years from MSPs saying that when I go and win business, I no longer lead with IT. I lead with cyber and then I get the IT as a result of that. And that one sentence that we heard, I'll never forget the first person we heard it from, really changed the way we thought about ourselves and the way we felt others need to think about us. And that platform play, best of breed, full end to end cyber resilience is what we deliver and it's an open platform. It's done in a way that we can easily defend how we're differentiated against the competition. We're very thoughtful in creating that narrative and now in the midst of delivering that. So you see that on the website now, you'll see that show up at events, you'll see our PR, you'll see our AR, you'll see a lot of the ways that we go to market represented as cybersecurity and there's still a tremendous amount more to do there.

Yeah. You see folks like CrowdStrike and even Arctic Wolf and SentinelOne leading with a platform story. And so it's not that it can't be done. It's not that there aren't proof points for that. Our belief is it's still much more likely to be a point solution kind of problem and thought that occurs in the mind of the prospect first and then we got to evolve them to that. I can imagine over time though as we grow and as we drive more awareness for the brand that we could take a position like CrowdStrike does with Falcon at some point in the future.

That's an awesome question. Maybe it's more rhetorical, I don't know. There's so much change and obviously AI is driving such a significant shift in what is possible. And what I keep saying, and I talk to a lot of people about AI, many who are excited, many who are worried, and I think everybody says some of these things which, if you're worried, you really need to invest time in learning AI because it's going to be there for the long haul and you need to be educated on it. You need to make it a strength of yours. If you're worried about it, if you're excited about it, then go experiment and learn how it can apply. What I'm probably most excited about when it comes to AI because it can help every single aspect of marketing. There's not a single part of our jobs that AI cannot assist with. And that word 'assist' matters. I don't think it can replace in many cases, not yet certainly. And I don't think it will for quite a while. But the thing that excites me most is the ability to take AI and apply it to some combination of personalization and workflow automation. And you look at companies like Tofu or Trigify or some of these folks who are bringing together data that exists in the wild. It's available for anybody. It's public use data. It exists within that data and if you apply that and add your own internal first-party data, there are nuggets of information that are signals that are incredibly powerful for segmentation whether it's one to one or one to many where you can become more relevant, you can become more timely, you can do that at scale because AI can automate some of those workflows in ways that could never have been done. I mean a year ago, six months ago, we amongst our team would talk about, 'Well, what's the next layer of segmentation we want to add? Is it another? Do we want to now introduce persona into the way that we market to people? Do we want to add industry into the way that we market to people? Do we want to think about another segment, a whole segment that we want to think?' And each conversation like that has excitement, but the flip of the coin is how are we going to do it? We don't have any more resources. Every time we add an element of segmentation or personalization, it's more work to create content. It's more work to deliver content. It's more work to measure content and those are all meaningful. Now AI can really help with that. So it can do a lot. That's probably the thing I'm most excited about. And I think it will open up new ways for us to engage with prospects and create demand in ways that we couldn't before. Enter markets that we couldn't enter before because capacity didn't allow for it. But we got to be careful with it as well because we want to be mindful of driving trust in the market. We want to be mindful of not always relying on AI to do everything because it will get it wrong a lot of times and we need to make sure that we have oversight and governance in place to ensure that we abide by all of that.

Right. Exactly. Imagine that world and somebody still has to evaluate it and look at the content and make sure it makes sense and come up with the tests, but AI is simplifying a lot of that as well. So it's an exciting time for marketers. I think it's time, if you're listening to this and you're not spending time educating yourself on AI, the thing I talk most to my teams about and some of my peers is really get outside of the four walls that you're in and certainly starting with customer and understanding their needs is most important, but AI is a great place. Just schedule some meetings with vendors and hear what they're talking about. Go on YouTube and do some searches for what marketers are doing with AI. You're going to find some really cool use cases, some of which might scare you, others of which will probably really excite you. Try some stuff. That's the best thing. Try it. Know how to measure it. Know how long it takes. Know what good looks like and then you'll find out if it works or not.

Yeah, you just got to start. That's the thing. Jeff, it was a great chat. You've had an amazing journey so far in your career. Looking forward to hearing about what you're up to next.

Awesome. Thank you. Good chat, Jeff.